Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Wondering

Why it is that on June the 11th I can still see my breath in the air when I leave the apartment in the morning?
One of these days Vancouver... Wham! Bam! Straight to the moon!

Monday, June 09, 2008

Sunday in Vancouver

Yesterday I had lunch in the same restaurant as this person, (she did not really look like an alien), watched a triathlon from the sidelines, and learned how to properly drink whiskey so that it doesn't burn your mouth.

When we show you around Vancouver, we pull out all the stops.

Thursday, June 05, 2008

All in the fold

Hello Internet! I have been busy. Sick and busy. Sick because I’ve been busy – you know how it goes. And I have been neglectful. Oh my goodness where did May go? But enough! This is my website until I get around to building myself a new one, and I feel like telling a story if you feel like reading one.

I don’t know why I’m thinking about this. Possibly because I’ve been stalking dooce’s site since I found out SHE WAS WALKING AROUND VANCOUVER FOR FIVE DAYS WHILE I WAS IN BLOODY WHISTLER and she keeps making references like this one which make me want to cry because that store is where we bought all the stuff to make our wedding invitations and I LOVE IT TOO! And maybe we would be friends now if I hadn’t been working in Whistler that weekend… unaware…

But enough of the crazy. What really made me think of this story was this post, and the reference to putting underwear in the freezer. And here it is:

TM puts his socks into strange little balls. I don’t mean he balls up his dirty socks – he does that too sometimes – I mean when he’s folding laundry, his socks get sort of smushed into each other to make clean-sock-balls. I don’t understand this, but I’ve accepted it, and when I remember, attempt to make the smushy-clean-sock-balls out of his socks myself. He apparently can’t bring himself to actually wear them otherwise, and if I do the balls wrong, if I fold them simply the way that normal people do, he promptly redoes them for me. This is okay, and I’ve even come to develop a certain appreciation for what the sock-balls bring to our equation.

For instance, TM learned to juggle using his sock balls back when we were roommates in university, until I went out and found him real juggling balls. I figured if he was going to stick with this new found affinity he might as well look slightly less bizarre. See, even then I was encouraging his talents.

Sock balls also make excellent ammo. They won’t really hurt anyone, or break anything. You should probably know, though, that they also won’t really do so well at turning off an over head light once you’re already in bed and would rather throw things at the wall over and over than get up again. In our house, it’s 10 points every time you can hit TM in the head with a sock ball. 0 points for my head though.

Laundry folding invariably turns into a sock-ball fight. Actually, for two mature people into their second quarter century of life, you may be surprised how much throwing of things goes on at our place. Like that time that TM’s dad accidentally threw a coaster out the window of our 16th floor apartment. He didn’t get the 10 points he was aiming for, but this was much funnier.

Anyway, there was one particularly grueling and extended sock-ball fight (I don’t give up very easily once you start me going) that ended up with TM stealing and hiding a pair of my socks (semi-balled) so that I would stop throwing them. Or maybe to distract me with something new. I hunted all over the apartment and couldn’t find them, even with TM’s hints of warmer/colder. I couldn’t understand why everywhere I went he was always saying “colder.” I presumed he was just lying, until he finally said “You’re getting really, really cold,” and I found my socks in the freezer.

Well! Then TM, naively assuming the war was over, went to the bathroom.

And I stuck HIS socks in the freezer.

And then we went to bed and I forgot about them.

We have a great tendency to forget things in our freezer. I don’t think we’re alone in this. Anyone who’s ever been 16 years old can probably tell you what happens to carbonated alcoholic beverages when you stick them in the freezer to chill and then forget about them. The freezer is kind of one of those out-of-sight-out-of-mind deals, and I bet if I randomly opened any of your freezers right now, I could find something, way in the far reaches, that you wouldn’t recognize or remember ever putting in there.

And so it will come as no shock to you, that some weeks ago we HAD put a beer in our freezer and forgotten about it. We forgot about it for DAYS, until we opened the freezer again for some reason and oh my goodness – there’s BEER ALL OVER EVERYTHING. And like any other normal person, we lamented, grabbed what we wanted out of the freezer, cleaned the frozen beer off of that one item, and closed the door again. We would deal with THAT later.

Except, well, we didn’t. We again forgot the beer was there. So when I stuck TM’s socks in the freezer, socks that were nice and warm out of the dryer, and left them there for days until he finally opened the freezer door and found them (and oh, I laughed so hard), what had before been a nice clean sock ball, was now a sock ball that had melted the beer in the freezer, absorbed it, refrozen, and become stuck to the package of peas.

And that is why, dear Internet, I will be buying TM socks for Christmas for the rest of my life. Not because I can’t think of anything better, or because that’s the sort of present one typically buys one’s husband, but because the welfare of TM’s socks is henceforth solely my responsibility.